Spilled Tea, Wet Pants & Self-Defense

So what does spilled tea and wet pants have to do with self-defense training? Amazingly a lot if you understand that learned skills should and are transferable to everyday situations. So, here’s the story.

My family and I were driving back from South Carolina yesterday after visiting with the folks for the holidays and we decided to stop at our favorite road trip restaurant, Cracker Barrel. Everything was going fine. We were enjoying our meal and having a pleasant family meal.

In an instant, everything changed. I “heard” my nine-year olds large glass of ice tea shift and I slid off of my chair and up, just as her glass toppled over and spilled the entire contents of ice tea across the table and down my chair. For me, I avoided having wet pants for the remaining 6 hours of driving time. For her, shock and awe that I moved that fast and didn’t get wet.

So what does this have to do with self-defense? One of the first lessons we teach at Women’s Self-Defense Institute is that self-defense is 90% awareness training. If you are paying attention to your environment, you increase your response time because you can “perceive” danger before it strikes. Paying attention to your environment involves all your senses, not just your eyes. By “hearing” a change in how the glass sounded as it hit the table, I perceived a possible threat.

The second lesson that we teach is to trust your instincts. Instinct is nothing more than your subconscious brain allowed to do its job in protecting you. By paying attention to your instincts, you are able to respond quickly to what’s around you. For most women, instincts are over-ridden because we don’t want to appear to be rude, offend or perceived as silly. Well, for me, my instincts said that the glass was going to fall. The worst that would have happened had I been wrong was being stared at by strangers wondering what was wrong with me. Since I’ve learned in my 44 years not to really care what other people think, I was okay with that. The best case scenario was, of course, the fact that I avoided having wet pants.

The third lesson that we teach is reflex training. Reflex training focuses on using your body’s innate sympathetic nervous system response mechanisms to deal with potentially violent situations. Now granted, 99.99% of the time, a glass of spilled ice tea isn’t going to kill you or severely damage you, but what if it was a knife, a punch or grabbing hands moving towards you? Do you have the reflexes to respond and move out of the way?

So the lesson of the story is that by studying self-defense I was able to perceive and respond to a potential threat and avoid ending up with a pair of wet pants. It doesn’t take years or months to learn proper self-defense training. And good self-defense training skills can transfer over to day to day situations such as a spilled glass of tea.

When it takes less than micro seconds to respond to a potential threat, is your self-defense training complete?

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Angie M. Tarighi is the CEO & Founder of Women's Self-Defense Institute and has been teaching women's self-defense programs for over 20 years. She is a tireless advocate of self-reliance and responsibility, encouraging women to actively protect life through awareness and education.

Angie created Women's Self-Defense Institute to share information, resources, products, training and advice about safety and survival to women nationally & internationally coping with a dangerous world. Angie brings humor and real world examples to her training empowering women to tap into their own strengths and become their own best self-defense advocates.